#this is kinda long

[squash1]

reading extremely loud and incredibly close (absolutely devastating, highly recommend) and i can’t stop thinking about this passage in connection to the dreamer trilogy/maggie stiefvater lore:

i don’t know how i know this (i know it is in some respect true although i may be misremembering details) but i remember maggie talking about how one day she was driving to some mundane place — the sort of place you go everyday, the sort of drive you don’t even think about because it’s become second nature — in one of her unusual, maggie-like cars and coming toward her on the other side of the road is her same exact car, and driving that car is a person that looks, from a distance, an awful lot like her. and in my recollection she was so shaken in this moment — essentially having this intense feeling of seeing herself duplicated, another version of her driving around her life — that she turned around and went home. and that this experience is what inspired the dreamer trilogy.

the idea of a doppelgänger, or a twinned self, is so embedded in the dreamer trilogy so knowing this origin story makes it all the more interesting to me. in mythology a doppelgänger is often a bad omen, a bringer of bad luck, like an evil twin, but that’s not really the case in real life or tdt. in the case of hennessy and jordan, niall and the new fenian, mór and aurora, they are all literal copies of one another — a face, a body copy and pasted. the pairs are mirrors of each other living parallel lives — in many ways more different from one another than similar. at least one of them is constantly wondering, am i the imposter? have you gotten it more right than i have?

declan and ronan are mirrors — constantly forced to recognize their father in one another and themselves. and this — the moment when ronan first sees the new fenian and thinks is that me? — feels more the like universal human experience than the true, exact copies do. that moment is the experience of maggie seeing someone with her car and changing course, turning the mundane to the extraordinary. it’s a wake up call. it’s a nudge from the universe.

it’s the moments of recognizing ourselves in others, others recognizing themselves in us. of walking around the world looking like your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, and every stranger you’ve never met.

[yumenikkii]

just another average day in gravity falls

[mercurio-shadowz]

Shadow “finds out” he’s “a gay”: the comic

(There is no finding out, I lied )

He’ll figure it out eventually, once he decides to stop being difficult xD

Next up, shadow tries on a cutesy dress :>

[hinamie]

growth // decay

[oolong---latte]

[culbi]

oh hiiii

[starrspice]

Ew, they're Flirting fighting again

[adyophene]

Husk's secret weapon

[isjasz]

Feather and Crystal (I remember)

Set after wild life session 5, under the premise that dd gave each other a feather earring and a crystal necklace back in 3rd life <3 They can be seen in a lot of my past pieces, the og concept was from bugs buggsxp back during dl !!

[thestuffedalligator]

The way necromancy works is this: Everything in your body — meat, bones, skin, blood — has something like a memory. They remember, in their own way, what it’s like to be alive. Skin remembers the sun. Bones remember what shape they’re supposed to be in. Muscle memory is more than just an idiom.

The way necromancy works is that the caster puts a little bit of their willpower into a corpse to order it to remember how it functioned in life and obey. This is easiest to do with bones, which are easy to trick, and becomes increasingly difficult the more of the original body remains.

To reanimate a full body to your command, you have to have a lot of willpower.

The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently. Then, taking the lantern off its hook, she peered over the side of the little sailboat.

There wasn't much to see. The sea was dark and still as glass, except where the lanternlight turned a patch of seawater a yellowish-green. A tiny fish flitted into the gleam, attracted to the light, and then vanished into the murk again.

The necromancer chewed the inside of her cheek. She sat down again, the boat bobbing gently with the movement, and checked the map one more time. Then she opened the little wooden case on the floor of the boat, which unfolded into a neat arrangement of drawers.

There were. Things. In the drawers. Some wriggled. Others twitched little beetly legs into the night air. A few of them made noises, which ran together into a squeaky, wheezy squeal of horror.

The necromancer twiddled her fingers over the display as she considered her options. Then she grabbed a few of the twitching, wriggling things, held them in her palm and squeezed her hand into a fist as tightly as she could with a squelching noise.

She opened her hand to inspect her work. She breathed the spell into it, and then, holding her hand over the edge of the boat, dropped the spell into the sea.

And that seemed to be it. She sat back in the boat and closed the little wooden case. After a moment she started looking over the map again.

There were a lot of handwritten notes on the map. Each one was connected to a mark and some coordinates; some of them said, "Storm 1457," or "Struck a rock 1483." Others said "Total failure," or “Completely dissolved.”

The note the necromancer seemed most interested in was the one that read, “Battle of Salzstein, 1501.”

The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently, and then she was suddenly thrown down to the floor of the boat as though a giant, invisible hand had crushed her.

Her mouth opened in a noiseless scream.

Two minds were fighting for control of the corpse; on one side was the mind of the caster, and on the other was the memories of bones, of flesh, of skin, trying to drive the caster out.

The weight of that mind was incredible.

Sweat poured off the necromancer’s brow; darkness whorled across her vision. Then slowly, every movement a bone-breaking agony, she pushed herself onto her hands and knees, lungs straining.

The trick was that this mind knew how to obey.

The necromancer stood, wobbled, steadied herself and poured her willpower into the sea. She tried to make hers the full willpower the thing had obeyed in life, the will of the wind, of the sea, of the rigging and the wheel.

Because of course it had been alive. In a sense, they were all alive. Sailors talked of them like they were alive, gave them names, called them “she.”

Sailors knew they were alive.

It was the cessation of that life that interested her.

The necromancer reached out with her power, seized the mind in her hands and pulled, blood and foam flecking out the corners of her mouth as she ground her teeth together with the titanic effort and ordered it to obey.

The sea roiled, hundreds of tons of water moving fast as something deep below boiled to the surface.

A bowsprit sprouted from the water. Then a wood-rotted figurehead of a mermaid. Then inch by inch, yard by yard, the huge barnacle-encrusted bulk of silt-stained timber rose out of the deep, seawater streaming out of every gunport.

For a moment the warship hung in the air like a monstrous fish held by the gills of a colossal fisherman. It dropped into the sea with a sound like a depth charge; the little rowboat lurched in its wake.

The necromancer released the spell. Then she threw up, and passed out.

———

Later, once she had woken, gathered together the tackle box, the lantern, and the map and had scrabbled aboard, the necromancer inspected the undead ship.

There was a hole in the hull where a magazine charge had exploded. This was, admittedly, fine. Undead men could walk with a hole in their bellies; an undead ship could sail with one as well.

Really, she thought, despite the discomfort the spell had worked masterfully.

It was a perfect start.

She unfolded the map on the soggy floor of the quarterdeck, sucked the end of a pen, and next to the last marker wrote “Total success.” Then her finger began to trace down the page to the next.

And the undead ship — unbidden and obedient — shifted its sails and began to move south.

[tazmiilly]

normal guy getting back from his normal guy grocery run

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Ultimately the reason why it makes me roll my eyes every time there's a post that makes fun of the way americans don't know shit about the world and someone adds a response about how it's not niceys to make fun of people for not knowing things and everyone has blindspots and you weren't born knowing everything and blah blah blah today's lucky 10.000 UwwwwwU etc. is because, ultimately, I don't think what's wrong with the average online american is that they're ignorant, ignorant people are everywhere, and everyone is ignorant about a lot of things.

What's wrong with the average online american is not that they're ignorant, it's that every time they have to confront the things they're ignorant about they immediately construct a narrative where their ignorance is the product of some uniquely and exclusively american disadvantage that they, and apparently no one else in the world, have to deal with ("our educative system doesn't teach us anything about the world, you don't understand how bad it is", "we're bombarded with propaganda since birth", "we're subjected to a culture that punishes curiosity instead of rewarding it", "we're so overworked and underpaid, you think we have the energy to try to learn anything in our spare time?", or my favorite I saw a couple months ago "well you might not know this but for the average american traveling abroad is not really accessible so it's not like we can visit other countries to learn about their culture" as if the average person outside the US is constantly taking international vacations or something) when, in reality, their ignorance is a product of immense cultural privilege, a product of the fact that they even have the ability to go through their entire life without needing to learn shit about anywhere else in the world, which is something that no one else in the world has (well people from other first world countries kinda have it too but not to the same degree as americans because in terms of cultural hegemony the U.S. is the first world's first world)

[lembowe]

i don't remember what originally inspired this but!!!! i think siffrin would be really happy to see other weather

[lovelenivy]

mouse bites™

[raffi-cat]

red crowned crane grian

[lauraneedstochill]

“The Pitt”: Jack Abbot’s appreciation post 🔥 original posts: x, x, x, x, x, x, x + other characters: part 1, 2, 3, 5